The Return of the King
by Jaimi-Sam
Summary: When Thunderbird Five picks up a distress signal from a colony ship that is returning to Earth after sustaining heavy damage in a meteor storm, rescuing the people on board becomes the least of International Rescue's worries...


_Co-Winner of the Tracy Island Writers Forum 2011 Fic Swap Challenge._

_**The Request I Received:** "An old Earth Exploration Spacecraft is finally returning to Earth after a, say, 10 year mission with heavy damage after encountering a meteor storm in space, leaving them able to send a distress call but not receive any messages back. TB3 has to deal with the situation, which means trying to help people who have never even heard of International Rescue..."_

_**THE RETURN OF THE KING**_

John Tracy was in his element. Seated in the gloriously comfortable body-molding leather embrace of his custom built chair, right in the center of the transparent observatory bubble atop International Rescue's communications satellite, _Thunderbird Five_. Surrounded by a dozen screens, some of them hard and some virtual, all of them alive with swirling patterns of stars and data and multihued connecting lines. In front of him, splaying out like a silver and white multi-armed octopus, the vast, shiny, custom built bulk of the multi-functional telescope array he had affectionately nicknamed the Hydra. This telescope, and its to-die-for location, had been a big part of Jeff Tracy's pitch to John to buy a ticket aboard his father's grand dream to save the world. Sure, John knew it had been a bribe, and he knew his father knew he knew. But they also both knew he would have signed on anyway…and that made it all right.

Besides, they'd all been bribed, one way or another.

The specially shielded smartpad sitting on the console beside his stainless steel coffee mug trilled softly for his attention, and he glanced over as a text popped up, accompanied by the photo of a pretty, delicate-featured Indian woman. _Still looking at that gamma blast data from Swift?_

John checked his watch, its modified Rolex Submariner casing effectively concealing the sophisticated communication device it really was. Three a.m. at Mauna Kea; Haleema "Hal" Cherukiri was on shift at the Hawaiian observatory. Thinking of his friend made John suddenly aware of how hungry he was…she made the best curry he'd ever tasted. _Guilty_, he texted back. _You know me and black holes._

_LOL! Who says there's a black hole?_

_You wanna bet?_

_I can't afford to bet you, Johnny. I'm just a poor NASA astronomer._

John grinned. _I'll settle for some of that curry the next time I'm in Hawaii._

_IF you win, smart boy. Chandra isn't backing you._

_Chandra isn't _not_ backing me. Last I heard, the guys in Massachusetts hadn't come to a conclusion either way. _

John glanced over at the screen to his immediate right, which was set to display a continuous rotation of combined images from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical and X-ray telescopes. It was one of the things that made life entertaining, the mostly friendly competition between astronomers the world over when one of the big orbital supertelescopes like the Hubble, the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer or the Chandra X-ray Observatory – some of them now on their third and fourth incarnations in space – spotted something out of the ordinary. This one had been a gamma ray burst that had gone on for an extraordinary length of time, and John was convinced the intense tidal forces of a black hole were at the center of it.

The illumination in the observation dome flashed to infra-red, then back to its usual dimmed-out daylight-fluorescent hue. A steady chime alerted him that his presence was needed downstairs, at the console of his day job. John glanced around at the starfield through the triple-paned, ninety-six percent fused silica glass of the observation dome and sighed. _Got to go_, he texted. _Tell me if Chandra comes through._

_You'll know before I do,_ Haleema texted back. _You always do. One day I'll figure out how you do that. :-P_

_You keep dreaming. _

The lift tube made short work of depositing him in _Thunderbird Five's _control center. John's eyes scanned the long sweep of instruments as he took his seat before the central communications panel. The onboard AI sensed his arrival and intoned its message. _Encoded signal received at 01:15 hours by Luna 15 satellite. Laser needlecast burst, origin unknown. Estimated distance at time of dispatch, 1,520,000 kilometers. _

John, who had opened his mouth to ask why the computer had found it necessary to interrupt him for an encoded signal from the Moon, shut it again abruptly at the last sentence. He keyed up the virtual screens in front of him, fingers sweeping the air as he opened the datalink keyed to his wrist communicator. "Display message," he ordered. Gordon had nicknamed the AI "Robby" on his first rotation up here, in honor of a robot character from an old 2D television series he had once found. John hadn't quite been able to persuade himself to go there.

_Unable to decode, _the AI responded. _Key damaged or missing._ Computerese for "I can't read a language nobody's taught me."

John sighed. As good as computers were at this kind of thing, sometimes the skill of a really good hacker was still the only thing that worked. "Show me."

The message's numeral stream flashed up in front of him in a soft neon green. John frowned. He hadn't seen a code set like this for years. "This looks like it could be stale. Is it a repeater?"

_Negative. Original receipt confirmed, 01:15 hours by _Luna 15_._

John sat back, studying the numbers, glowing like muted fireflies in the air before him. Something had begun to niggle at the back of his brain, something he couldn't quite get hold of. Something… He frowned, trying to back up, to catch it.

And then he had it, almost smiling as he realized that he might not have remembered at all if he hadn't just been talking to Haleema in Hawaii. The key was in those leading digits, and an inside joke about volcanoes…

"Jesus Christ," he said out loud, in utter disbelief. "It's the _King Kamehameha!_"

* * *

><p>"The <em>King Kamehameha<em>?" Jeff Tracy, resplendent in maroon paisley print pajamas, rubbed his stubbled chin. "Are you sure, son?"

"Get me the code key and I'll confirm it. Those New Pioneer guys were paranoid to the extreme…I can't break it without destroying the message."

Jeff picked up his smartpad from the desk and began punching digits, walking across the lounge toward the balcony doors as he lifted the device to his ear. John watched him go from the vidscreen, wondering why neither his father nor his eldest brother could ever seem to sit or stand still while on the phone. "Hey, somebody put me on multicam, will you? Dad forgot again."

"The _King Kamehameha_…that was that bunch of weirdos with that multimillion-dollar compound in Hawaii…the ones who were going to find God on Jupiter, right?" Alan had just come into the lounge, all curly blond bedhead and a logo tee-shirt so bright it made John blink.

"Yeah," Gordon said, leaning over the desk to switch the feed to the setting that allowed John to see the entire room, a recent addition to their vidcam arsenal. His military-green tank was a welcome respite for John's eyes. "Dr. Jared Mikelsohn and the New Pioneers."

"Sounds like a rock band, only back in Dad's day when they had those lame names."

"That would have been more _my_ day, young man," Ruth Tracy remarked as she entered the lounge, still tying her robe. Her hair, once as red-gold as Gordon's, was braided down her back in a long silver-gray rope. "Your father's not nearly as old as you seem to think."

"You don't think "The Tragically Impaled" is a lame name?" Gordon raised an eyebrow at his younger brother's tee-shirt.

"Are you kidding? Those guys are _wavy_, man."

"Wavy?" Ruth looked at him. "Is that good or bad? I can't keep up."

Across the room, next to the digital portrait of Lady Penelope, the eyes on Tin-Tin's portrait lit up. Already on his way to the couch, Gordon detoured back to the desk and hit the switch that turned the view into a live feed. Behind the beautiful green-eyed Eurasian woman they could see a partial view of the island's launch control room, situated in the Cliff House below Tracy Villa. She was looking down, busy with the control panel below the camera's range of vision. "Mr. Tracy, Scott and Virgil are landing now. I'll send them up."

They could all hear the sound of powerful jet engines now, _Tracy Two_ sweeping in on final approach. "Thanks, Tin-Tin," Gordon grinned, "But you don't have to call me "mister."

Tin-Tin glanced up, rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue.

"OK, John, you've got your code. It's being transmitted now." Jeff crossed back into the room from the moonlit balcony, brushing past the long white drapes.

"Thanks, Dad." John looked off to the right and they could see him manipulating the virtual screens, although not what he was doing on them.

Jeff took his seat behind the desk. "Do you really think it's the _Kamehameha, _Dad?" Alan asked. "Surely they have to be dead by now."

"My brother, the optimist," Gordon said, shaking his head.

"Well, think about it, Gordo. When did they leave Earth's orbit, 2021? They were trying to get to Jupiter – 588,000,000 kilometers on a good day – in a decommissioned freighter only designed for the Earth-Moon run!"

"You of all people should not be questioning the power of an unlimited budget, son," Jeff remarked drily.

Alan opened his mouth, but Jeff's attention was on the vidscreen, where John was turning back to face them. "OK, everyone, here it comes."

It was a young woman's voice, and she sounded bad. Once in a while, on a tough rescue when everything seemed to be slipping out of control, they had heard Tin-Tin like this…tired, teary but struggling to be brave. "_Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Nuclear Technician, First Class Iolana __Kahananui of the New Pioneer ship _King Kamehameha_. We are aborting our mission and returning home with heavy damage from a meteor storm. It completely overwhelmed our shields. We've lost four of our hydroponic gardens and our recycling plants are failing. The air is getting very bad. Many of the crew are dead and a lot of those who survived are sick. I don't know why, but something about the sickness is making them go crazy. Our captain, Dr. Mikelsohn is…he's not himself. He wants us to arm the missiles. He's ordered a complete communications blackout. He says our enemies on Earth are responsible for what has happened to us, and that we must destroy them. He says…he says God has told him that WE are Judgement Day."_

"Oh, dear Lord," Ruth burst out.

"_I have managed to hide for a long time, but now Dr. Mikelsohn is looking for me. Lieutenant Dahlquist died this morning and that means I'm the last surviving bomb officer. He needs me to arm the missiles. I'm going to lock myself in with the bombs, I have no other choice. I don't know how long I can hold out, but I can't let them do this. If there's anyone out there who can hear me, please help us. Please."_

The transmission faded to static.

"Dad," John said, very quietly, after a long moment of horrified silence from his family in the lounge, "I know her. She was in a couple of my classes at Tracy College. I had no idea she was on board the _Kamehameha_."

"But Dr. Mikelsohn is a man of God…surely he wouldn't really use those missiles on _us,_ would he?" Ruth was struggling.

"He was a decorated US Navy SEAL before he got religion, Grandma," Gordon pointed out. "Remember those rumors that he went off the rails for a while in Bereznik after his team was hit by friendly fire? I know people back in WASP who still can't quite believe they gave him the Medal of Honor."

Ruth pursed her lips unhappily, but she didn't argue.

"How far out was the _Kamehameha_ when this message was sent, John?" Jeff asked, brow furrowed.

John had to clear his throat; focus back on the task at hand. "About a million and a half klicks," he said, glancing at the screens beside him. "She's a Vulcan class, early stage plasma-based propulsion – I've got her spec sheet right here. If her power plant's still intact and she's coming in at somewhere near maximum thrust – which sounds likely considering their circumstances – that would put her about eight days out."

"Where was _Luna 15_ when it picked up the message?" Alan asked.

John glanced again to the right, fingers tracing in the air. "Right over Farside Station."

"They didn't have the LunaNet Satellite Ring back in 2021," Alan said, slowly. "Mikelsohn doesn't think we can see them, coming in with the Moon always between them and Earth. Knowing that, we would have the advantage…"

Jeff gave his youngest a sharp glance. Alan was doing one of his intuitive leaps – they came out of nowhere, and he'd driven his teachers crazy with it in school because he always hit the right answers, but had no way to show how he got there. "Son, don't get ahead of yourself here. This isn't something that we should be…"

"Dad," John interrupted, "If we have this message, so does every member of the Global Federation for Space Exploration. I don't know how long it's going to take all of them to break the encoding, but I'm willing to bet we're not far ahead of the curve here."

"And that means it's only a matter of time before the governments of this planet know there's a ship headed their way with enough nuclear missiles on board to blast a hole right through us." Scott came striding through the doorway with Virgil on his heels, and they were both frowning. Tin-Tin had obviously alerted them to the conversation with John; they had their ears on. "As soon as she gets within range…"

"They'll blow her to Kingdom Come," Gordon said. "Ironically."

"You heard that poor girl, Jeff," Ruth put in. "Your college trained her to be an astronaut, for heaven's sake. We have to do _something_."

"Mother…" Jeff shook his head in exasperation.

"Grandma's right, Dad," Virgil said. "If we have a chance of getting to them first, then surely we have to at least try!"

Everyone in the lounge held their breath as Jeff Tracy stared into space for a long moment. Then: "All right. We're in."

"Thank you," John said quietly.

Jeff met his son's eyes for a moment, and nodded. Then they could all see their father switching gears to what Scott and Gordon called his tactical operations mode. "John, start listening in to see if anyone's decoded the message yet and more importantly, what they're planning on doing about it. Scott, Alan, get ready to launch _Thunderbird Three_. The quicker we get this show on the road, the better. Gordon, Virgil, you're going along, we're going to need all hands on deck for this one – if I remember rightly the _Kamehameha_ had upwards of five hundred crew members when she left orbit. You two can flip a coin for who gets to man _Five_."

"Man _Five_?" John asked, confused.

"Yes, son, I definitely need you on _Three_ with Scott and Alan on this one."

John allowed himself to crack a small smile. "Yes, sir."

"Mr. Tracy," Tin-Tin interjected from her screen, "I could man _Five_. I'm due for a rotation up there anyway."

"Oh, you _had_ to volunteer," Gordon groaned quietly. Virgil shot him a sympathetic look – unlike their brothers, neither of them were exactly thrilled by the idea of space flight. And rotation aboard _Thunderbird Five_ was like spending a few days at a resort hotel compared to the prospects of a long haul through the great airless void in _Thunderbird Three_. John would have argued calling it a void, of course, but still. As far as Virgil and Gordon were concerned, nothing was just that…nothing.

"All right, Tin-Tin, thank you," Jeff said. "It will leave us short-handed down here, but we'll just have to cope. What's Brains' ETA from London?"

"He should be landing in about an hour."

"Get me a secure line to him, John," Jeff said, glancing back at John's portrait. "And stay on it. We need a plan."

* * *

><p>The news of the <em>King Kamehameha's <em>return broke as _Thunderbird Three_ braked to match orbits with her spacebound sister three hours later. As the four Tracy sons, Tin-Tin and Brains came down the docking tube into _Five's_ main level, boots squeaking slightly on the anti-slip decking, they heard the familiar sound of their old friend Ned Cook's voice from above them on the control room level. Grim-eyed, Scott led the charge up the gantry steps to stand in front of the main screen behind John. The NTBS Global star reporter was broadcasting live on the newsvid feed, surrounded by rotating holos of the _King Kamehameha's_ crew.

"Damn," Virgil shook his head. "How did they get a hold of this so soon?"

Alan rolled his eyes. "Have you _met _Ned Cook?"

Scott glanced at John, nodded toward the screen. "Is he talking about the bombs?"

"Not yet," John said.

Scott relaxed just a little, shoulders loosening. "Five will get you ten, Dad filled Ned in so he could get out there with it first," he said. "Probably promised him he'd get the exclusive scoop from us when it's all over."

"Why would your father do that?" Tin-Tin asked. "What good would it do?"

"Ned's the only newsman Dad trusts," Gordon pointed out. "He's the only one _any_ of us trusts."

"He's told Ned about the missiles, I'm sure of it," Scott said. "And Ned's made the deal not to release that, at least not right now, to buy us and that crew out there some time. He's a big enough name that everyone else will think he's gotten the whole story, and they'll take their cue from him for now."

"That's a-a very good thing, uh, Scott," Brains put in. "But we'd better, uh, hope that nobody, uh, leaks the rest. There could be total, uh, global panic."

"And a planet-wide outcry for the _Kamehameha_ to be destroyed," Gordon said soberly.

"That's still very likely to happen," Scott said. "We need to get on with this, people. Grab your gear, John…we burn in thirty."

* * *

><p><em>Hurry up and wait,<em> Gordon thought, staring out of the porthole at the starfield beyond as _Thunderbird Three_ burned for the Moon. This was just like the military. They jerked you awake at zero-dark-thirty, a time of the morning that most normal people didn't even acknowledge existed unless they were creeping home after an all-night bender, gave you three and a half minutes to pee, shower and eat breakfast – if they gave you breakfast – and then sat you in a tin can for eight days. Gordon had been here before. But then he'd called it submarine duty.

Brains hadn't invented the GRB, the internally generated gravity reduction bubble that surrounded _Three's_ command cabin and living quarters, but he had been closely involved with the people who had, and had snagged the inventors for Tracy Aerospace and their research for International Rescue's vehicles at the earliest opportunity. _Thunderbird One_ had a version that shielded Scott from the intense, otherwise unlivable g-forces that were a consequence of her ferocious acceleration and deceleration, without which she wouldn't be able to travel the distances she did in the times that she did. Optimized in Brains' inimitable fashion, which usually meant to the limits of the original technology and often beyond, _Three's _GRB made long periods of acceleration burn a lot more comfortable than they should have been – but Gordon could still feel the pressure, which made it hard to breathe at times and caused a low grade tension headache at the base of his skull. Brains had dispassionately issued analgesics as IR's rescue rocket had fired her attitude jets and slowly backed away from _Thunderbird Five's_ docking tube, telling them they'd be just fine and the likelihood of needing anything more wasn't great.

Gordon wasn't so sure. Long periods of burn had been known to cause brain bleeds…there had been a high profile court case a few months back involving a Matthias Corp supply freighter that had been delayed leaving International Space Station 6 by some idiotic customs snafu, and the captain had tried to make up for the lost time to the Moon with extended acceleration – despite a GRB generator he knew to be malfunctioning and in need of service. Two of the crew were still in comas. And Gordon didn't care how often Alan pointed out that if something happened to them out here, it wouldn't matter if _Thunderbird Three_ was surrounded by water or the vacuum of space – they'd be just as dead, just as quickly. Gordon knew that the environments weren't equal…people got careless in hard space, they took chances they wouldn't take in water. The view from up here made them feel invincible. In water, you could drown, sure. But up here, you could fall forever.

Not that it would be worth bringing any of that up again to any of the more space-friendly Tracys. Alan, he remembered a little sourly, hadn't taken the analgesics Brains had offered. Neither had Scott. Gordon decided he was probably adopted.

He did have to admit, though, that with a GRB generator like this – the best that Brains could optimize and the Tracy money could pay for – burning like this was worth it. It would take some fancy calculations, but if they could match trajectories with the incoming _King Kamehameha_ accurately enough, they could cut as much as two days off their previously estimated time to the rendezvous. John and Alan were huddled over the pilot's console right now, running astrogation programs – developed at Tracy Aerospace by the best minds in the industry – and going back and forth with _Thunderbird Three's_ AI. They looked for all the world as if they were playing one of their complicated virtual games. Gordon was too far away to hear most of what they were saying, but every once in a while John's right hand would sweep the air and a vertical screen would briefly form, and then disappear again in a shower of colored light. It was like watching Virgil play piano, in a way – art of another kind.

They wouldn't know for a while how closely they'd called it, but Scott had said he was absolutely willing to take the shot. There was nobody he had more faith in than the people in this room, he'd told them all, and he'd be happy to stake his life on what they could do. Gordon had to give it to him; his eldest brother knew how to motivate people.

Scott had also been working since they'd started the burn. He'd commandeered the command cabin's table screen as his Jump CP (mobile command post – he always snapped right back into military terminology whenever something important was going on) and had immediately started drawing up personnel duty schedules – sleeping, eating and exercising at this point, for most of them. As their field commander, he wanted his crew rested but sharp, ready for whatever happened. He'd learned from commanding a combat strike wing in the Second Bereznik War that lack of proper sleep killed more pilots than enemy fire, and he rode very strict herd on their flying times whenever they were out on a rescue. He also ran a tight ship when it came to ongoing training – he saw to it that all of them, including Tin-Tin and Brains, were checked out on every machine they flew or drove on a continual basis. There were primaries, and backups, and backups to the backups, on every mission. Gordon and Alan might refer to him once in a while as the ghost of General Patton, especially after a grueling round of training, but they had to admit that Scott never asked them to do anything that he wasn't out there front and center doing ahead of them.

Back on Tracy Island, their father was managing the flow of information, with Tin-Tin manning the communications equipment on _Five_ as his ears to the world. From what Jeff had relayed to them in the most recent burst, his insiders were telling him that international debate at the highest level was raging behind the closed doors of premiers worldwide. Unlike the general public, they all knew about the _Kamehameha's_ armaments, and opinions varied from "This is a cock-and-bull story, no way would anyone really do this to his home world" to "They're out of their minds, and we need to launch a counterattack as soon as they get within range of our missiles." Some were being rational when weighing in, some seemed to simply be refusing to agree with their ideological enemies no matter how much sense they were making. But that might be good for International Rescue's mission at hand …the beautiful thing about political leaders, as their father pointed out, was that most of them weren't free to act without the approval of a majority, so as long as they couldn't or wouldn't agree with each other, the _Kamehameha, _and by extension the crew of _Thunderbird Three,_ remained relatively safe.

As an extra security measure, Jeff had also taken care of filing flight plans with LunaNet, the company that owned and operated the ring of satellites that surrounded Earth's moon. On his instruction, John reprogrammed _Thunderbird Three's_ transponder so that LunaNet would identify her as a survey rocket sent out by a company named Dangrek Mining, Inc., which owned several installations on the far side of the Moon. She probably wouldn't pass close enough to any of the spiny orbiting sentinels for her transponder to trigger, but better that they were expecting her if she did. The point of this trip was not to set off _anyone's_ defenses, even those on Luna.

* * *

><p><em>Thunderbird Three<em> blew past the Moon in ten hours and thirty-five minutes, pretty close to the record. Going by the log John hacked into as they went by, LunaNet never even knew they'd been there.

After a quick breakfast that still consisted of fresh food at this point in the voyage…they'd be into the MREs before their return, and nobody was looking forward to that…the crew gathered for a "hurry up" briefing on the New Pioneers and what they were doing in a modified Vulcan Class freighter originally headed for the moons of Jupiter. Jeff and Tin-Tin's father, Kyrano, had worked late into the day distilling the essential research and packaging it into a needlecast burst that had relayed while most of _Three's_ crew were still sleeping. Jeff had hinted that some of the modifications his contacts had uncovered were spectacular.

Scott temporarily relinquished command of the table screen so Virgil could set up the holo display. After a few moments of sync time with his handheld, Virgil stepped back and a three dimensional image of the _King Kamehameha_ popped up, rotating slowly in place so they could see it from all angles. She was a big ship, almost a mile long; ugly in the way transportation could only be when it was built in space and there was no need for aerodynamics. She was basically a cluster of tubes bolted together, like a fist full of fat, white pencils, with a bulbous "head" on one end that contained the command bridge. Running the length of either side were chunky outriggers, an aftermarket modification that had allowed the addition of six hydroponic gardens, three port and three starboard, each topped with a vast, circular, transparent dome. Despite Alan's disparaging remarks back on the island, it was quickly obvious to _Thunderbird Three's_ crew that they were looking at a solid, powerful, long range vehicle…with her hydroponics and her hydrogen-fuelled plasma drive, the _Kamehameha_ could have kept going out into space for a long, long time.

Except that something had gone very, very wrong.

"How about that," Gordon said, studying his smartpad; linked, as all of their handhelds now were, to the dataflow. "Mikelsohn wanted to call her the _Hawaiian Garden_ in honor of all those hydroponics…but his group voted it down. They thought it made them sound like a Waikiki motel."

Virgil cracked a half-grin. With one eye on the specs displaying on his own pad, he used a laser pointer to illuminate various areas of the Kamehameha. "Main power plant is here…she might have started life as an Earth-Moon freighter, but this Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket technology was state of the art in 2021. She uses an electric power source to ionize hydrogen fuel into plasma, and electric fields heat and…"

"Virg," Scott said. "Is this mission critical?"

Virgil paused in midsentence, glanced around. "Sorry," he said, "Engineer geek moment."

Across the room, Brains was smiling in understanding.

"OK…crew quarters and living areas are all through here, in the three innermost cylinders…better protection from radiation. Command bridge is up here."

"The part with the big windshield," Gordon supplied helpfully.

"Where are the missiles?" Scott asked. The furrow between his eyes looked exactly like his father's when they were both concentrating hard.

"Bomb room's here," Virgil said, indicating a blocky area at the forward end of one of the long cylinders that made up the ship's body, directly aft and beneath the command bridge.

"That's, uh, where I-Iolana Kahananui is, then," Brains put in.

Virgil nodded. "Nuclear material originates there, torpedoes rack up through here and here to the fire tubes." His pointer described arcs to cylinders higher up on either side of the bridge.

Gordon whistled at the data he was reading. "Holy crap. She's got twenty eight tactical nukes on board."

Alan stared at the floating hologram. "Did they know something about Jupiter's moons that we don't?"

"The New, ah, Pioneers were not a, ah, pacifistic group," Brains said. "Dr, ah, Mikelsohn made frequent mentions of, uh, warrior a-archangels in his sermons. He believed in, uh, religious purification by fire."

"Figures, considering his background," Gordon said. "I really think the reports on the ground were right…he went off his nut in Bereznik."

"Wouldn't be the first," Scott murmured, almost too quietly for anyone else to hear.

"But where did they get them?" Alan asked. "The nukes, I mean…"

"Black market, probably," Scott said. "You can get anything you want if you can pay for it. I've seen that myself."

John leaned forward, his expression intent. "In Eastern Europe?"

"Yep. It was after Buzz got shot down, when we spent those days on the ground behind Berenora's lines. We saw a lot of shit, things they told us not to talk about at the time."

Gordon exchanged eyebrow-raised glances with Alan…Scott almost never talked about his two tours of duty in the Bereznik War theater, even after he'd gotten decorated twice, the second time for following his wingman to the ground after his fighter had been damaged by enemy fire and subsequently having to lead the two of them on foot to safety. Only Virgil's expression showed no surprise at what he was hearing. "We got contacted by a Marine Force Recon team on the third day…Hellboy Two. Dad would never say, but I think he had a lot to do with them finding us so fast. We learned a lot from those guys. They never knew what the labels were going to look like on any of the hardware they were running into out there. Chinese I-SAM rocket trucks, Russian M4-40 knockoffs with Bulgarian infrared scopes and ammo out of North Korea... Didn't you ever wonder how a nation state as geographically small as Bereznik could hold off the best the world could throw at it? From what I've read, I think that's how the _Kamehameha_ came together. It's like the reverse of the old NASA space program…highest bidder gets the billet – and the right to a piece of the future."

John was nodding slowly in agreement. "It makes sense now. The Western press assumed it was a one-way mission. They thought Mikelsohn was going to get five hundred people killed, and one day one of our deep space probes would send back a vidstream of the debris – end of story. The Eastern bloc and half of Asia saw it differently. They believed it could be done, they got on board to help it along. They smelled opportunity."

_Encoded signal incoming, _the onboard AI interrupted suddenly_. Needlecast burst. Origin parameters match known signature of _King Kamehameha_. _

Alan shot Scott a look. He nodded. "Decode," Alan told the AI.

It was the same young woman's voice, even more stressed than before. "_Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Iolana Kahananui again from the _King Kamehameha_. I don't know if anyone out there can hear this, but I want this on record somewhere. Somebody has to know what's happening here. I've had to lock myself in the bomb room to keep Dr. Mikelsohn from getting at the nukes. I'm the only one left on board who knows how to arm them, but I'm not counting on him not finding a way to figure it out, even if the specs _are_ all in Mandarin. He might even speak it for all I know…he's a very clever man. He's been talking to me for two days, trying to persuade me to give up. I've got an electronic jammer on the door so forcing it won't do him any good, believe me he's tried. An hour ago he finally lost his temper, said he was going to have someone bring my parents, have them talk some sense into me. It's been so bad here, he doesn't know that they both died of the meteor fever. When he finds out, he'll be back."_

"Shit," Virgil said quietly. Scott stared at the pilot's console, eyes harsh. He didn't deal well with helplessness. None of them did.

"_When he realizes he can't talk me into giving up, he's going to try to force me out. I'm ready for that. He'll probably try blowing the airlock…the bombs won't be hurt by vacuum, but I will be. I've got an emergency suit, but the air in it won't last forever. I don't know what to do, but have to come up with _something_. I just _have_ to." _

The transmission ended. The crew of _Thunderbird Three_ listened to the empty air for a long moment.

"Alan, what's our new ETA?" Scott rapped out.

"If the Kamehameha maintains full thrust – and remember, that's only a best guess at this point - 77 hours. Give or take."

Scott got up and walked away. Even Virgil didn't follow him.

* * *

><p>The news of Jared Mikelsohn's plans for the nuclear warheads aboard the <em>King Kamehameha<em> broke planetwide twelve hours later, via a blogger for the rogue political mega-zine _Politopix. _She had somehow gotten hold of a leaked transcript of Iolana Kahananui's first SOS – there were too many possible sources to have any hope of tracking it accurately – and she reproduced it in its blunt, raw entirety for her audience. The post went viral within two hours, so many people tried to log on at once to read it that they crashed the servers. Within twelve more hours, the crew of _Thunderbird Three_ watched in horror as Jeff fed them images from demonstrations outside the White House, Britain's Houses of Parliament, Australia's Parliament House, Germany's Reichstag building and in front of every other major seat of government across the globe. Emergency sessions had been called for the United Nations and the Global Federation for Space Exploration. The same debates that had been heating up restricted communications between heads of state only a couple of days previously were now being hashed out across rooms full of government representatives in full view of the public. Every talkvid show, political and otherwise, was going nuts. All of them were demanding that someone, somewhere, do _something_.

_Thunderbird Three_ was still more than twenty-four hours short of her planned rendezvous with the King Kamehameha when Jeff contacted them with the worst news of all. Two long-mothballed silos of ICBMs on the far side of the moon, installed during the paranoid time following the Third World War, had been abruptly reclassified as active. Remote warmup programs had already been initiated, and a team of nuclear weapons experts was on its way from Luna City.

"Can they do it, Dad?" Scott asked, tension vibrating from every muscle. "Can they get a green light to launch?"

"I don't want to believe it either, son…but from what I'm hearing, it seems likely. The force of public opinion alone down here right now… I don't have to tell you what will happen if the world's politicians do nothing and Mikelsohn is able to fire his nukes. And I've thought about it every way possible, but I can't risk your lives by telling anyone that we're involved. If they should attempt to hail the _Kamehameha_ and tell them there's a ship on the way, Mikelsohn could turn one of those missiles on _Thunderbird Three_."

"We're still twenty-four hours out, Dad," Virgil said. "Are we going to have enough time to do any good at all before those missiles launch from the Moon?"

"I don't know, Virgil. I don't know." Jeff's concern was clear in his voice. They all knew how helpless they felt…how much worse must it be for those left behind on Earth? "Twenty-four hours… You're going to be going in very close to the wire."

Brains spoke up. "Ah, Mr. Tracy, when have we, ah, ever _not?_"

As serious as the situation was, they all had to smile at that one.

* * *

><p>"<em>It's Iolana from the King Kamehameha again."<em> She sounded completely wrung out now, voice slower and heavier. _"I'm out of time. Dr. Mikelsohn has told me I have two hours to come out or he's going to blow the airlock from the outside. I have no choice, I'm going to start wrecking the bombs. I know I'm taking a terrible risk but I don't see what else I can do. My rad disk isn't looking good as it is, but I'm still below critical exposure levels. I've just got to hope the rad suit protects me."_

"Oh, uh, that's really not, ah, a good idea," Brains said, brow creased in uncharacteristic worry. "If she, ah, exposes the plutonium cores…"

Scott glanced at him sharply. "What happens if she does?"

"Critical plutonium exposure is fatal, Scott," John said quietly. "There's no cure. Even our antiradiation drugs can't do anything beyond a certain level of exposure. The bomb room is bathed in neutrons as it is. The radioactive material is buried in a tamper, probably gold in those bombs. It stops everything but some of the gamma radiation, but it can't block neutrons or the chain reaction will set off an explosion. She gets enough of those neutrons in her system and she's dead."

"And she's, uh, been in there so, ah, long, a-already…"

"But…isn't there some kind of warning system…a Geiger counter…_something…_?" Virgil didn't want to believe, _couldn't_ believe the death sentence Brains and John were pronouncing.

"Plutonium barely affects a Geiger counter," John said. "Secondary infection from plutonium does. The only thing Lana has to go on right now is her rad disk. If it darkens beyond a certain level, it's over."

Scott's jaw was tight. "Then we have to get there in time. It's as simple as that."

* * *

><p>"<em>Iolana here. I did it, I figured out how to stop Mikelsohn. I've wrecked all the bombs except number fourteen, because it's the closest to the middle of the room and near the floor. I've rigged a dead man switch. Or dead woman, in this case." <em>They all winced at the high, breathless voice; the tight, exhausted giggle. _"I told Mikelsohn – he said he didn't think I had the guts to kill myself. I said I didn't have to…the bomb won't go off as long as I'm alive. But if they bust in here, BOOM! I let go of this strap – and we're all dead." _There was a long pause, then, more soberly now,_ "I haven't looked at my rad disk since I've been in the suit. I don't think I want to know what color it is. If anyone's out there, do one thing for me, please. Pray for me."_

* * *

><p>They made visual contact with the <em>King Kamehameha<em> four hours later. What they saw was shocking in its contrast with the pristine, intact holographic image they'd all seen during the briefing. The big freighter's once white surface was scarred and furrowed, and great chunks of her external antennae and other equipment were gone, torn off by meteors in that killer shower. The forward two hydroponics gardens on the port side were missing altogether, the outriggers that had once supported them ending in raw, jagged metal. The forward two on the starboard side were still attached, but topped now by shattered domes that looked like the mouths of some misshapen monster, and the gardens that had once thrived within were nothing now but blasted out wreckage.

Nobody hailed them, which they didn't know was good or bad.

Scott ordered everyone to suit up in preparation for boarding, and directed Alan to take _Thunderbird Three_ around and beneath the _Kamehameha_, approaching from underneath where they would be least likely to be spotted.

"Take her up under the bomb room structure, as close as you can, and match trajectories," he said, watching the screen from behind Alan's command chair as the vast bulk of the other ship slid by overhead. "Gordon, monitor the incoming channels. Let me know right away if you hear anything from Dad about those ICBMs."

"What are you going to do?" Alan asked.

"Johnny, Virgil and I are going to get Iolana out. We know there's an external airlock…she talked about Mikelsohn threatening to blow it. And after we get her, we're going after him."

"But I should…"

"Al, nobody but you has the skill to hold _Three_ where I need her right now, not even me," Scott interrupted. "Come on, work with me here. We're out of time."

Alan nodded tightly, reluctant to agree, but knowing he was right. Scott waved Virgil and John toward the airlock.

"What's the plan, Scott?" Virgil asked as they checked their weapons, double checked the seals and oxygen systems on each others' international orange vacuum suits and then stood in the outer chamber of the airlock while John bled out the air to match the vacuum outside. He was talking as much to take his mind off what was about to happen as anything. He didn't think he'd ever get used to this part, the part where he had to step beyond the relative security of _Thunderbird Three_ and into the infinite emptiness of space.

The indicator above the outer door blinked to green. John keyed in the opening sequence on the keypad. In answer to Virgil's question, Scott held up something in one gloved hand – something long and metal with one bulky end.

"A wrench?" Virgil stared at him.

"Exactly," Scott grinned. "We can't risk any kind of radio contact with Iolana…we don't know what Mikelsohn and the others can hear. Clear?"

_Just like mud,_ Virgil thought in frustration…but it was time to exit the airlock. Braced, he pulled himself hand over hand outside after John, taking a deep breath against the moment of vertigo he knew was coming. To distract himself from the wheeling starfield, he kept his eye on the underside of the _Kamehameha_, reassuring in its solidity right above them. He and John both snapped the remote-release-capable hooks at the end of their safety lines to metal loops just beside the airlock door, and Scott, bringing up the rear, did the same. It might not look like it from their perspective, but both _Three_ and the _Kamehameha_ were moving, and moving fast, so it was necessary to keep themselves securely tethered to one of the two ships at all times while outside.

The airlock closed silently behind them. Scott pointed up – it helped Virgil to keep thinking in terms of "up" and "down," even though those terms were pretty much meaningless out here. They all three touched their jetpack controls just a little, and the boost floated them up toward the big freighter. A couple of small course corrections and they arrived beside the outer airlock of the bomb room. After attaching their secondary lines, they triggered their remote releases and reeled in the lines that had connected them to _Thunderbird Three_.

Scott turned toward the other two, brandishing the wrench. "Johnny, remember your communications classes at Tracy College?"

It took a second…and then John's eyes went wide and he started laughing. "Scott, that is brilliant!"

Virgil looked from one to the other. "Would somebody mind letting me in on the joke?"

"Morse code, Virgil. It's one of Dad's required courses, remember? Lana went to Tracy College, just like we all did. She'll know it."

Just as he always insisted that his sons should be able to fix what they flew and drove, within reason, Jeff also championed the study and retention of low tech solutions to many situations. It was easy, he'd always told them all, to allow technology to make them complacent. The first men to reach the Moon, all the way back in 1969, had had far less computer technology on board their Apollo spacecraft than a modern smartphone, yet with the aid of slide rules and the like, they had made it all the way to Earth's satellite and back in safety. And if they could do it, then there was no reason, he frequently said, that his boys – and his students at Tracy College – couldn't do the same. And it might just save their lives one day.

Or someone else's. Virgil thought about Iolana, and went cold. He hoped against hope that they would get an answer from inside the bomb room.

John braced himself with a handhold near the airlock door and started swinging the wrench against the hull of the _Kamehameha_. They couldn't hear the impacts in vacuum, but inside the bomb room it should be easily audible.

The comm units in their helmets crackled to life. "Scott…guys…we just got a transmission from Dad. The Farside silos are operational and they've gotten the green light to fire. They're computing target variables now. Dad expects the countdown to start within two hours."

"Shit," Scott swore softly. He met Virgil's eyes for a moment, then they both forced their attention back to the swinging of John's wrench.

John paused at the end of his message. HELLO IOLANA, THIS IS INTERNATIONAL RESCUE. CAN YOU HEAR US?

As one, all three Tracy brothers pulled themselves against the freighter's bulk and touched their helmets to the scarred and pitted metal outer skin.

Nothing.

Biting his lip, John repeated the message. They listened again.

Still no response. John took a deep breath, looked at his brothers, then hammered it out a third time.

They all prayed, as Iolana Kahananui had so recently asked them to do.

And then they heard it – a sudden impact on the other side of the freighter's hull that made their straining senses jump. The short sound vibrated through their helmets…then, oh, God, yes, there it was again…two more impacts with longer pauses in between them, then four short raps, then three longer ones again.

John had to clear his throat. "Who. She said _who_…"

"Wait!" Virgil said urgently. "There's more!"

John listened to the pattern, half laughing with relief as it ended and he repeated the full phrase. _"Who the heck is International Rescue?"_

Face to face, or at least faceplate to faceplate, Iolana Kahananui was ghostly pale with huge dark bruises under both eyes, and could barely stand upright unsupported. She looked very, very sick indeed. Silently fearing that they might be too late to save her life, Scott commended her out loud for her bravery and allowed her to briefly explain to them how to dismantle the dead man switch she had rigged on bomb number fourteen. Then he dispatched her in Virgil's care to the safety of the sick bay on board _Thunderbird Three_.

Then it was time to see what was behind the interior hatch. They had heard nothing from the ship beyond the bomb room since they'd gained access through the airlock. Scott and John drew their weapons – specially modified versions of the standard issue sunjets, since nobody in their right mind would use a ballistic weapon aboard a spacegoing vessel – and keyed in the jammer code that Iolana had also given them. The indicator light switched from red to green, and the hatch began to open.

The glint of light on metal was all that warned him. "Incoming!" Scott howled, throwing himself at John. The sunjet blasted over their heads, charring the nearest bulkhead inside the bomb room. The two Tracy brothers scrambled to either side of the now completely open door.

There was no follow-up. Frowning, Scott grabbed the nearest small object, a tool pod, and swung it through the opening.

Nothing happened. Then, after a long moment, somebody coughed – a deep, wrenching, disturbingly wet sound.

Scott shot a glance at John. He signaled him to stay put, and then very slowly leaned through the door, sunjet at the ready.

What he saw outside was a shock. The corridor floor was strewn with men – passed out or dead, he couldn't immediately tell. They all wore the same two-tone green shirts; he could see the embroidered patches of the New Pioneers' mission on those who were lying face-up. Scott's attention finally centered on one man in particular, sitting rather than lying on the ground with his back propped against the far wall, staring at the intruders through glassy, unfocused eyes. His breathing was noisy and rasping, and he was sweating profusely. A thin line of blood trickled from both his ears.

Scott stepped forward and kicked the sunjet away from Jared Mikelsohn's unprotesting right hand. It was over.

* * *

><p>Later, the crew of <em>Thunderbird Three<em> would find out just how close they'd cut it this time – how very nearly Jeff Tracy had not been in time to stop the firing of the Farside ICBMs. In retrospect, John was glad none of them had known until the danger was well past.

Joining Scott in the corridor, he'd listened to Scott immediately signaling Gordon to send the transmission to their father that the threat was neutralized, and that International Rescue was now in control of the _King Kamehameha. _Scott also relayed that the peoples of Earth owed their lives to the extreme bravery and self-sacrifice of the _Kamehameha's_ last surviving bomb officer, who deserved at the very least the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

John wholeheartedly agreed. He just hoped they wouldn't have to award it posthumously. It would be a few days at least, at that point, before they'd know for sure either way.

Jeff and the members of IR left behind would be celebrating the news of the mission's success – but the crew of _Thunderbird Three_ had work ahead of them before it would be their turn. First order of business had been to make their way to the command bridge to set a new course for the Moon's orbit – they didn't dare bring the _Kamehameha_ closer to Earth than that, considering her cargo and the unknown sickness that had crippled her crew. As it was, they needed to perform all rescue work in Hazmat suits, and Scott and John would need to be watched carefully in case they developed symptoms of the bizarre infection that had felled the New Pioneer crew. They needed to seal the bomb room to contain as much of the radiation leakage as possible, and they had to bring Virgil and Gordon over with medkits to help them do a sweep of the entire ship for survivors and bodies alike. They would perform triage as they went for the sick and wounded, and after he had done his best to stabilize Iolana and treat her with the strong antiradiation drugs they carried aboard _Three_, Brains' medical qualifications would be pressed into service on the _Kamehameha_ for the rest of her crew.

There would be an investigation, of course. But from what Iolana had relayed in her transmissions, coupled with what they had seen on her ship with their own eyes, it was clear that the infection carried by the meteor shower had ravaged the _King Kamehameha's_ crew in a completely unexpected way, killing a large number of them and causing widespread mental breakdown in most of those who survived. _War of the Worlds_ indeed, John thought, remembering the old H.G. Wells science fiction story he'd read as a child – only in that version of the scenario, the alien invaders had been brought down by a simple _earthbound_ infection. Weakened by the obviously virulent contagion and only protected in the most minimal fashion by their primitive GRB from the physical effects of extended burn – hard enough on the human body when it was in prime condition – the New Pioneers had never had a chance.

As for International Rescue, their job was done when they parked the _King Kamehameha_ in stable orbit above the Moon and faded like ghosts from the scene just ahead of the incoming retrieval crew from Luna City. By that time, Brains had one piece of good news to share…he was now cautiously optimistic that Iolana Kahananui would pull through, although she had some hard rehabilitation time ahead of her.

And as he finally crawled into his bunk to collapse for a few hours while _Thunderbird Three _burned for their South Seas home, John got the news on his smartpad that Chandra had confirmed his black hole.

_You owe me curry_, he texted to Haleema Cherukiri's addy – and then he slept.


End file.
